171–180 of 286 posts
If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.
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In Dutch we indeed happily do this even for English loanwords like "creditcard" or something more obscure like "lockpick". When in doubt, remove the space.
That happens often with domain names, but then you get expertsexchange.com, penisland.net, whorepresents.com, therapistfinder.com, a Dutch pre-match analysis site voorspel.nl, or a site about the game overspel.nl. Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs&t=1477s Not to mention Tobias Fünke’s analyst + therapist web site, analrapist.com.
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Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup? Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional…
[To be clear, the below is me agreeing with you] Norwegian is almost as compound-happy as German, and we could've filled many volumes with compounds. But what generally happens for one of the compunds to enter the dictionary is that the compound needs to have a meaning that is non-obvious from the individual parts, at least to some people, and typically that the compound has a non-obvious meaning if interpreted as tw…
(In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup? Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional…
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But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam. As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice. So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.
Freezing water is already at or below 0, it doesn't need to get "colder" to turn into ice, it simply needs to exchange the energy with the environment and rearrange in crystals. Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder. But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals.
> But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals
Water at freezing temperature can get much colder without freezing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling:
“Water normally freezes at 273.15 K (0.0 °C; 32 °F), but it can be "supercooled" at standard pressure down to its crystal homogeneous nucleation at almost 224.8 K (−48.3 °C; −55.0 °F).”
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but can't you basically make anything a composite noun in German? That it's a single word doesn't really help you decided if it has enough presence unto itself to be defined in the dictionary. Seems like they would have just as much of a problem since the issue is delineating when a "phrase" becomes a "word"
not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".
(1) Who counted those? Whence those numbers?
(2) The examples are normal two-word phrases with one word modifying the other, often categorised as an adjective. The examples are counter-examples to the very claim made in that article.
(3) Using Clause to brainstorm s.t. is a weird thing to say...
(4) I would say the use of 'lexicalized' is wrong or at least uncommon. It usually refers to specialised semantics of something that could be interpreted generically, too. Like 'sleeping bag'. Or indeed 'cold feet'. Lexicalisation may involve deleting spaces, like 'hotdog'. And I am pretty sure lexicalised phrasal words are usually intensionally listed in dictionaries. And so 'ice' is not lexicalised 'frozen water', but it is not overtly a phrase but is a separate atomic word.
=> I don't get the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam. As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice. So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.
Freezing water is already at or below 0, it doesn't need to get "colder" to turn into ice, it simply needs to exchange the energy with the environment and rearrange in crystals. Basically as it gets colder water exchanges energy with the environment and gets colder. But once it reaches freezing temperature, it can no longer get colder and all the energy is used for the formation of crystals.
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
What's ice cream then?
I'm the author. Updated the article based on this thread — thanks to everyone who pushed back. Changes: reframed "boiling water" as deliberately on-the-fence rather than asserting it's a word; added a note that the obscure end of the slider is noise; acknowledged collocations as the established term; added a German/Dutch/Norwegian section on how other languages handle the space problem; softened "wasn't possible befo…